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Longmont's inaugural dream festival focused on community, creativity

By Whitney BryenLongmont Times-Call

Posted:
07/22/2013 07:32:07 PM MDT

Updated:
07/22/2013 07:35:08 PM MDT

Brenda Ferrimani, left, Billie Ortiz, center, and Donna Remmert participate in a dream interpretation group in Boulder on July 17. Group members work together to help each other interpret their dreams.
(
Michael Wilson
)

Every Wednesday evening, Lafayette resident Billie Ortiz welcomes a group of women to a rented office space in Boulder to spend several hours interpreting one another's dreams and deciphering the meaning behind them.

The members -- typically five to 10 women from across Boulder County --believe that dreams, if correctly interpreted, can provide key insights about their lives and selves.

"We all put our names in a bowl and then we have casual, spontaneous conversations explaining what that person's dream could mean," said Boulder resident Donna Remmert, who regularly attends the group. "Our conversations can become really hilarious and bizarre, but in the end the dreamer decides the meaning of the dreams; we just help interpret the metaphors."

Boulder County has a handful of groups like Ortiz's that meet regularly and practice variations of dream analysis. Next month, the dream community will come together for the first Waking the Dreamer Within Festival in Longmont.

The four-day festival -- Aug. 8-11 -- will bring speakers from across the country to the SpringHill Suites to teach area residents about dream interpretation and practice creative expression.

Ortiz was inspired to launch the festival this year as she celebrated 20 dream retreats, which she hosts twice a year with Jeremy Taylor, author and founder of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

She began attending Taylor's dream-interpretation sessions in 1996, and in 2002 she had a dream that inspired her to start the retreats.

Ortiz started her company Wake up to Your Dreams, which offers discussion groups, mentorship and private sessions, about 10 years ago and said the Boulder County dream community continues to grow.

"We've all worked on our dreams together, and together the community grew into their own power," Ortiz said. "So many people have gone on to writing books or creating art or other things inspired by their experiences with dream groups, so in a way, it's also a celebration of that."

Remmert will host a workshop Aug. 9 about how to use dreams as the inspiration for stories and memoirs, she said.

"I'll talk about how my dreams affect my stories and how my stories come into my dreams," Remmert said. "It's interesting how it works both ways."

Festival events include group discussions, dream analysis, poetry and art classes, and a gong bath, in which the subject lies on the floor in a room while another person plays a gong, causing sound waves to "wash" over the subject.

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